


Never Once Had a Smile

by omphale23



Category: The Curse - Josh Ritter (Song)
Genre: Cancer, F/F, F/M, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-20
Updated: 2015-12-20
Packaged: 2018-05-07 19:53:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5468879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>True love never did her any favors, anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Once Had a Smile

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Framlingem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Framlingem/gifts).



Agnes was eleven the first time she tried to run away. She was gone for six hours, and trudged back into the house covered in mud and dragging her backpack by one broken strap. No one had noticed that she was gone, or at least no one mentioned it. Agnes tried not to mind. Secretly she wondered.

Every weekend, her family—both boys, her mother, her father, any cousins who happened to be visiting that month—piled into the van dressed in Sunday clothes and drove the miles between home and what her mother called _a proper church, none of this revision and forgiveness and understanding nonsense_. Every weekend. 

But on Sunday afternoons, Agnes followed the song of a bird down the wind-whipped streets of Cairo. Sometimes she practiced saying it the way her history teacher did, the way it sounded outside the edges of Illinois. Sometimes she felt a chill run up her spine, like someone was watching. Mostly, she kept to the sunshine and whistled through the gap in her teeth, remembering lives she hadn't lived yet.

At twelve, Agnes was a world unto herself. Her father found a new job and the family moved to Henrietta, which was the same as Cairo, only smaller, rougher. The church was down the street, not across the county line. It was ten years further into fading away. Agnes didn't notice.

Three years later, she was caught kissing the vice-principal's nephew. Agnes might have found space for regret, but she was too busy trying to argue out of a week-long suspension and a filmstrip on bad kids and bad choices and bad ends. It wasn't until she unlocked the front door that night that she remembered no one else had been called in for a meeting. 

When she was sixteen, the pastor sat down with Agnes and asked her what she wanted to do with her life. He pursed his lips at her response, and later she waited alone in the hallway as he met with her parents. 

***

And so the summer after she turned eighteen, Agnes stepped down from a bus.

Hannibal was another gray town, streets of cracked asphalt and the past hanging over the buildings like a pall. The college was little better, filled with girls who raised their hands in hesitant stages and grass that grew neat and untrammeled. The chapel squatted in the center of campus, and Agnes dutifully raised her voice in praise within its walls. She wrote letters home filled with apologies. She wondered, but she kept her head down.

And then she met Kathleen. Kathleen with her golden hair and deep voice, Kathleen who laughed through dinner and passed profane notes during vigil, Kathleen and her books that smuggled ideas into the citadel of parental protections and dusty creeds. Kathleen was everything Agnes had feared, and at first she shied away. She prayed, and glared, and stared at the sidewalk cracks as Kathleen and her friends called across the grass.

But Agnes could never resist an invitation, and she wanted—something. To be noticed, to hold her head up high, to run away and change her name. The night before graduation, they danced barefoot in the grass and promised never to forget Delilah and Esther, Ruth and Mary Magdalene. 

Kathleen packed her bags and set off in search of new memories. Agnes went home. 

But home hadn't changed, and she screamed on the inside but found herself cleaning tables at the diner and knitting on the sofa and waiting, always waiting, as her mother grew pale and frail and her older brother shouted at demons in the basement and her father drank himself quiet each night. Waiting, and hoping, and lingering over the dishes, remembering women who had held themselves together with faith and stubbornness and a little bit of luck.

Her mother died on Agnes's twenty-second birthday, and the plant closed two weeks later. At the dinner table, Agnes watched what was left of her family push casserole around their plates and she tried to pray. She built questions and protests behind her teeth, and then swallowed them down past the knot in her throat. She stopped getting out of bed on Sunday mornings, and ignored the slamming doors and stomping feet until the house settled into creaks and whispers.

She started listening to birdsong again, and dreaming of places older than history.

She could hear the murmurs as she shopped for spices and eggs and milk, but Agnes chatted with the cashier and kept her steps firm. She was polite. She wrote out dozens of cards and found places for all the sympathy blankets. She took her knitting to the park and watched the children point and she smiled at the mothers, her old classmates, even when they turned away. She never flinched where they could see.

And then, just as Agnes began to resign herself to a small life in the small town that knew almost all of her secrets, the accident changed everything. The police offered platitudes and Agnes didn't weep, she didn't gnash her teeth, she simply braced herself in the doorway and bit her lips and shook until the feeling passed. 

Alone in the house, she wrote obituaries and scheduled viewings and refused to break. She drove into Putney and sat with the pastor—who didn't like her, still, and made it clear that he intended to give his poor lost parishioners a proper burial despite her presence—as the details were decided. She sat alone in the front pew, she wore black, and she took her fury and melted it into grief. She burned bright with it, and the church was full and loud but the seats around her were empty.

They didn't believe in curses, in Indiana. But Agnes wondered if maybe that didn't matter. 

No one found a note of her gratitude in the mailbox that autumn. The house settled around her. Agnes invited in a cat and went back to the diner and she waited for something and nothing. 

When Kathleen arrived on her doorstep, Agnes shrugged and opened her arms wide. When Kathleen stacked the applications for graduate programs on the table, Agnes filled them out. When Kathleen phoned the realtor and led newlywed couples through the rooms, Agnes found reasons to be gone but didn't protest. 

At the end of winter, Kathleen packed up herself and the cat and her suitcases and called a cab. She left a phone number and an address on the refrigerator door. Agnes didn't say goodbye.

The day that her acceptance letter came in the mail, some tiny piece of her opened again. She drove up the highway and came home with a bottle of cheap wine and a car full of empty liquor boxes. She threw out the junk, sent the heirlooms to wide-flung and happier cousins, rented a storage room out by the refinery for the rest. In the end, Agnes climbed onto the Capitol Limited with a backpack and her father's old green duffle, Kathleen's note in her front pocket.

***

New York was loud, bright, grimy, and Agnes loved it so much that she felt guilty. She buried her tragedy under articles and lectures, and one semester turned into two turned into three turned into four. She defended her proposal, and packed up a bag full of long sleeves and heavy boots, ready to spend the summer digging into someone else's past. Her advisor—fidgety and quiet and prone to fits of unreasoning pique when the student union showed Indiana Jones films—left for his summer cottage. Kathleen auditioned for three commercials and a musical, found a chorus spot in a touring production, and boarded the cat with the upstairs neighbors. Agnes caught a flight to Frankfurt, and then to Egypt.

She was twenty-nine, and she had never been in love. She had never been beyond the shores of her home. But as the runway rose up to meet her, Agnes swore she heard a familiar melody.

Agnes spent three days pronouncing the name of the city flatly, confused and sweating, desperate to believe that she knew what she was doing. A week later, she found herself—through some process of permits and nods that remained impenetrably complex—in a tent outside of the Valley of Kings. The site managers ignored her. The other students guarded their words, gathering in the evenings to joke and complain while she curled awkwardly on a cot and brushed dirt out of the pages of Kathleen's letters. Agnes longed for home without being able to pinpoint where, exactly, that might be.

Much later, she would elide those months with a sigh, and pretend that her dreams had come true in the dust and dimness of a hidden chamber beneath ancient stones. She certainly thought so, at the time.

That afternoon, the day it all changed, Agnes hadn't expected much from her wanderings on the edges of the dig. Mostly she'd been looking for a shady spot to eat a sandwich, and when the ground shifted beneath her feet she stood very still and hoped that someone would hear her if the earth swallowed her whole. When nothing else happened, she ran for line and stakes and the closest director. It took nine weeks and three satellite calls to get approval, and Agnes wasn't even on site when the first trench was begun. 

It didn't matter, in the end. She was there when the chamber was opened, and that was enough. 

***

She snuck down to stowage at night. Every night. Her dreams turned haunted, with the ghosts of her past circling round and the uncertainty of the days ahead floating nearby. The birdsong in her head became a constant refrain. By the time he shifted, woke, Agnes wasn't convinced that her sleepless nights hadn't caught up with her at last. 

She asked his name, and he seemed insulted but gave it gladly enough. Agnes was happy enough calling him Meriptah, but was even happier to flatten the vowels into familiarity. It made the whole thing less strange.

For the first time in years, she knew what to do next. And so she wrote, page after page of notes and questions and hypotheses. She sketched diagrams in the margins, left hieroglyphic reminders to herself for research directions. She wrote it all down, every word, and saw her future open into months and years of shading and defining herself within a discipline grown fragile and divided. 

The ghosts receded, and Agnes carefully held her secrets. 

She sought special permission to visit the museum after hours, and when that was denied she found another way in, working as a guard while she wrote articles, published papers, built her first books. He tried to direct her, and Agnes learned to nod and take notes and write her own thoughts only during the days she spent in Kathleen's apartment, huddled over her notes with a pen and the cat wrapping around her ankles. She graduated, and no one mentioned the empty seats, the tickets unused. Kathleen made enough noise for ten, and afterward they strolled arm-in-arm along the river, debating Habermas and Cole Porter in equal measure.

Agnes supposed herself in love, either with him or with the promise he offered. It made little difference which it was. She felt light and alive and full of ideas that she once thought lost. She asked him about curses and got back demurrals, filing the moment away with long-forgotten childhood stories. He was a wonder, and she was wound up in his stories until she felt safe.

She sang him her childhood songs, the ones that had echoed with her footsteps in empty alleyways, and he taught her the words. Agnes built her life into a shrine to all that Meriptah could teach her, and worshiped gladly in it.

She was thirty-three the day that the biopsy results came back positive. 

She asked about curses again, and still didn't receive an answer. 

***

Kathleen was there, with crackers and tea after treatments, with books and music and a quiet shoulder, with blackout curtains and a cane that they covered in unicorn stickers and glitter. Agnes stopped working at the museum, sat up at night crying, and screamed insults she didn't mean at Kathleen, at the neighbors, at the cat. Sometime Kathleen screamed back, but one of them always apologized. They cried together over sad movies, and even over happy ones.

When she left for another tour, Kathleen listed her stops on the wall next to the door, and Agnes held her close and wished her a safe journey. She visited the museum in the afternoons, whispering her stories to Meriptah and waiting in vain for him to tap her arm and interrupt with a story of his own. He never did, and at closing time she would sigh and gather up her stool and her papers and step back into the fading light of of autumn.

When the news broke into her room with stories of a walking corpse, Agnes closed her book and gathered up her notes and took the 6 down to the museum. Meriptah waited there for her, surrounded by reporters and tourists, blinking in the sun. Agnes sighed and led him back inside, called the public relations department of the university, and settled in to wait for someone to decide what to do next. 

The museum booked the flights, the hotels, the venues, the photo ops, the treatments in far-flung towns. Agnes was there to soothe the nervous and offer soundbites. She waited at the edge of the stage, and she waited at hotel doors, and every few weeks she slipped away to sit in a pale room and poison herself. 

He asked her why she stayed, and she placed her hand on her heart and whispered about passion and loss and love. He asked her for advice, and she gave it. He asked her to offer excuses, to show other women to the door in the morning, to be a face in the doorway. She did.

Until she didn't.

There was no way to know when the last moment passed, when something she believed to be love shriveled up and died. But by the time they made it back to New York, Agnes was tired. She had heard too many stories, too many songs. She didn't want to dream of places she had never been. She was tired of curses, of cursing, of being cursed.

She left Meriptah on the steps of the museum and made her way home, through the blue light of dawn, to where Kathleen lay waiting, asleep on the couch, for their next life to begin.

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to Sansets for her eminently suitable advice, because as always she knows how people work better than I do.


End file.
